Last week, Brookfield singer-songwriter Nora Collins, 17, got to sing the national anthem at a Mitt Romney rally in West Allis.

On Friday, Collins will be campaigning in her own contest as one of 10 finalists in the Wisconsin Singer/Songwriter Series' Song Contest Competition. It's the first in a planned annual competition in the series' 20-year history, said founder Joe Delucia. "It was a good way of celebrating the song and how moving the medium of music can be," he said. | Nov. 8, 2012»Read Full Article

Perhaps no one but www.christucker.com/">Chris Tucker could comprehend how the comedian could collect $45 million upfront for appearing in the "Rush Hour" sequels and then essentially walk away from his career at the peak of his popularity. But one thing is clear: He didn't disappear from loss of talent.

Tucker's 90-minute stand-up set Friday at the Riverside Theater - one of his first comedy dates since relaunching his career in 2011 and his first in the United States this year - was actually far funnier than anything he ever did in those formulaic "Rush Hour" movies from 1998 to 2007, displaying a range of comedic chops beyond the nimble, squeaky-voiced, fast-talking funnyman that became his silver-screen shtick. | March 9, 2013»Read Full Article(5)

Former Milwaukeean and University School of Milwaukee alumnus Mark Rylance has been cast as Thomas Cromwell in HBO's six-episode miniseries adaptation of "Wolf Hall" and "Bring Up the Bodies," based on the books by Hilary Mantel.

"Wolf Hall," and "Bring Up the Bodies," both winners of the Man Booker Prize, are the fictional biography of Cromwell, who was one of the most powerful advisors of Henry VIII. | March 8, 2013»Read Full Blog Post

The Country Music Hall of Famer's Milwaukee show will come just weeks after the singer celebrates his 82nd birthday and two months shy of his final show - a sold out all-star affair at Nashville's Bridgestone Arena. | March 8, 2013»Read Full Blog Post

More Than They Bargained For: Scott Walker, Unions and the Fight for Wisconsin. By Jason Stein and Patrick Marley. University of Wisconsin Press. 350 pages. $26.95.

"Three weeks ago, we were all one happy family with the Packers," reflected a Wisconsin resident, nostalgically recalling the team's 2011 Super Bowl victory. "And now we're at each other's throats. This is ripping us apart."

There are many such quotes in "More Than They Bargained For," in which Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporters Jason Stein and Patrick Marley recount the 16 tumultuous months between Scott Walker's unexpected February 2011 proposal to repeal most public employees' collective bargaining rights and Walker's recall election in June 2012. | March 8, 2013»Read Full Article(1)

"Watch twenty men enter a thirty-by-thirty barbed-wire ring, fight till one man was left standing. Then another twenty numbers were called for the next free-for-all. Till Sunday, when the winning men were left to fight till one man stood bloody and toothless waiting for his cash prize."

Frank Bill is offering you a ringside seat to this fracas in his appropriately titled "Donnybrook," a novel that inexorably draws its characters - those who stay alive, anyway - to this "three-day, bare-knuckles tournament," held each muggy August in a remote enclave in southern Indiana. Entry fee to fight? $1,000. Prize if one emerges as king of the hill? $100,000. | March 8, 2013»Read Full Article

Chicago — A century ago there was a radical upheaval in art, a single exhibit that shocked and enraptured audiences. The Armory Show of 1913 introduced America to modern art, to the work of artists such as Duchamp, Matisse, Braque and Picasso.

Trent Miller, moved to Madison following graduate studies at Boston University. The Indiana native is not a typical transplant, at least in terms of the way he makes art. His work is formed through dialogue with local arts.

When he moved here, Miller did not waste time looking at and researching art in area museums and galleries. At Sheboygan's gem, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, he discovered the art of Nebraska-born Emery Blagdon. He was inspired by his sculptural "healing machines," which Blagdon believed generated electromagnetic energy and could alleviate pain or even cure disease. | March 8, 2013»Read Full Blog Post

Walk into the new City.Net Cafe at 306 E. Wisconsin Ave. and you’re bound to figure out that owner Sam E. Belton is into jazz.

Belton, a drummer, has jazz playing in the background — Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Wynton Marsalis — and the espresso drinks include Parker’s raspberry mocha (as in Charlie). | March 8, 2013»Read Full Blog Post(1)

"Oz the Great and Powerful" opens in theaters Friday, but this is only the latest incarnation of that magical, fumbling wizard. Writer Chris Foran offers a new look at Oz-ian films that have come before.